Right there was the answer why she’d gotten such minimal sympathy: she’d not played the game properly. Laurie turned up at their houses often enough, she’d had them around to hers. But in the digital age equivalent of nattering over the garden fence, she’d never pretended to be interested in Claire’s daughter’s tongue-tie, or Pri’s luxury shed-slash–summer house. Not least because she had a job where she spent hours in courtrooms with her phone on silent. Not being interested in social media made you seem aloof these days, except Laurie wasn’t aloof, just busy and slightly baffled by it.
